Video: Tom Waits recites “The Laughing Heart” by Charles Bukowski

Tom Waits said that Charles Bukowski “seemed to be a writer of the common people and street people, looking in the dark corners where no one seems to want to go.” Waits has gone there, and always—like his literary hero—returned with a hell of a story. In this short video, Waits channels Bukowski’s iconoclasm.

Photo shot Feb. 2, 1989 Ellen Jaskol/LA Times.